Late South Hadley resident Seth Machak remembered with acts of kindness after contracting deadly infection

"One of the many great things about Seth was that he would give you the shirt off his back. He was always helping people."

Seth Machak is shown congratulating a resident who participated in an art show at the East Village Place in East Longmeadow before he moved to Connecticut where he headed up a memory-impaired residential unit.

SOUTH HADLEY – One person bought her co-workers bagels and coffee. Another gave a ride to his friend whose car had broken down. Still another donated 25 pounds of dog food to the Thomas J. O’Connor animal shelter in Springfield.

Others bought restaurant gift certificates for a homeless man, rebuilt an old laptop computer to give to a friend, used a lunch break to visit disabled children and donated new puzzles and coloring books to a preschool.

Small acts of kindness have been falling like raindrops around South Hadley, and they are gathering to a torrent.

The kind deeds are in honor of Seth Machak, a South Hadley High School alumnus who had recently moved to Southbury, Conn. Earlier this month the 29-year-old man contracted a deadly infection as a complication of severe pneumonia. He was taken to the hospital on Feb. 18, and by evening he was moved to the Intensive Care Unit.

On Feb. 23, he died.

“It happened very fast,” said Michael Chunyk of South Hadley, a friend of Machak’s from childhood.

Seth’s family, including parents Mark and Cathy Machak, are devastated. They asked Chunyk to be their spokesman, though he, too, struggles with his grief as he tries to describe his life-long friend.

“It’s a tragedy for someone as young as he was to pass away,” said Chunyk. “It’s also hard for everyone because he had such an impact on their lives.

“One of the many great things about Seth was that he would give you the shirt off his back. He was always helping people. He could make you feel that you were his only friend in the world.”

Seth worked with memory-impaired adults at Watermark retirement communities, first in East Longmeadow and then in Southbury. He was a chaplain at Mount Tom Masonic Lodge in South Hadley, loved gardens and good food, and was a beekeeper.

When he became ill, his family launched a Facebook page to keep his many friends and admirers here and around the country updated on his condition.

They came up with the idea of asking people to do kind deeds for Seth’s sake while he was in the hospital, along the lines of the motto “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”

Somehow that became: “Acts of Sethness.”

As people reported their kind deeds, Cathy Machak would read them to her son in the hospital. She read them when he fell into a coma, and now that Seth is gone the family asks everyone who cared for him to continue acts of kindness in his memory.

By now, more than 68,000 people have viewed the original Facebook page, and a blog has been created. Readers can go to http://actsofsethness.blogspot.com to read about others’ acts of kindness large and small, or to report their own.

A benefit in Seth's memory will be held April 5 at 6 p.m.
at the Polish-American Club, South Hadley. Tickets are $25. Contact Abair at (413) 885-5696 for information. Proceeds will go to a charity of the Machak family’s choice.